Yahoo standings and category averages

This is going to be a fairly short entry, but I hope it will still be informative. A couple Fantasy Focus articles over the last few weeks have referenced Yahoo leagues and this article, which provides the category averages for teams that finished in the top three of 12-team, standard 5×5 leagues in 2008. As I mentioned in my last Roster Doctor article, at the beginning of each season, I like to compare my current teams to the standings of previous leagues to see how they might do. I’ll take the average line of the project systems (i.e. Marcel, CHONE, Bill James, etc.) for each starter, add those numbers up by category and then check those past standings to help gauge the number of points my current team might accumulate in each category. While not an exact science, this method gives me a rough estimate of how I might fare in a particular league.

While the aforementioned Yahoo article provides averages for the top three places for each category, I haven’t seen an article that provides averages across all places. Yahoo allows fantasy sports participants to check standings of the past leagues they have taken part in, so I have compiled category averages for all positions for every 12-team, 5×5, Roto-style leagues I have ever participated through Yahoo. Dating back to 2001, I have apparently played in 27 of said leagues (this sort of makes me wonder what I’ve been doing with my life over the last near-decade, but whatever). Here’s the data, separated by category and sorted in descending order:

Obviously, the sample size isn’t very large and I’m not sure taking averages across so many years is the best way to handle things, but I also don’t think these numbers are too far off from what the averages will be for all Yahoo leagues this year. Hopefully, this table will give you a general idea of where your team may finish at the end of the year, and also give you an idea as to categories in which you could use improvement.

This is good stuff. I find it useful to target 100 pts to win the league, and I track my pace each week against target. Point standings are deceptive early in the year so I prefer this approach so I don’t fall behind target.

I actually thought about averaging and presenting the overall points for each place, 1~12, from the 27 leagues. But the Yahoo article already mentions that the average overall score of the first place team last year was 95. I think that’s the only number people should really worry about. I do think 100 overall points is a good number to target though, to be on the safe side.